We drove down to Wrightsville Beach today only to be totally frustrated with the parking situation there.
After faring the traffic to get over the bridge, driving all the way to the end of the beach, and “perching” for 5 or 10 minutes to see if anyone was going to come out to their car to free up a spot, we decided to bag the beach and take advantage of the hotel pool instead.
Back we drove and enjoyed poolside for the afternoon, complete with a nice adult beverage or two, a lunch of Shrimp Curry in the room, and then some iPod music and reading back by the pool again.
Later in the day, Joe dropped me off at the Port City Java in the Harris Teeter on College Drive, while he did some shopping at a nearby shopping center.
I updated my iPod podcast subscriptions, and I worked on Friday and Saturday’s blog entries.
Joe returned after a while, and we hung out there a while longer, and we both put our earbuds in to avoid the drivel that was going on at the tables around us, at which three or four teen-aged Harris Teeter employees talked about things vitally important to them at their age and station in life.
Before leaving, we bought some turkey and (Portuguese!) rolls to make sandwiches for a light dinner in the room, as well as to have later in the evening when we returned from the bars.
We got to Costello’s at close to 10:00, and the place was teeming with old, straight people. Not that there’s anything wrong with straight people.
There were these three couples taking up a lot of room and being very loud, and two of the wives had obviously taken their husbands to a beach store before coming out, where they outfitted them in bright red and white flowery Hawaiian-type shirts loud enough to drown out the piano player.
After a while, another, younger, couple came in who obviously knew all these people—perhaps they were even children of one of the couples. The guy of this young couple, who was trying to be overly cool about being in a gay bar, did “Fossie hands” and a jerky, restrained rendition (due to the limited space around his feet) of the Can-Can to the pianist’s version of Sinatra’s… “Start spreading the news…“
At one point, one of the flowered-shirt guys went over to the dimmer switch for the entire bar, and turned it up all the way bright so that he could show the others in their group a photo album he just happened to have with him. I mean, You just do what you need to do, Mary.
The queers all squealed and shielded their faces like cockroaches caught in the light, and refrained from yelling, “We need back-lighting, Mary.”
I had a little spat with the bartender when he charged Joe $11.50 (already overpriced) for our first round of drinks and then charged me $12.00 for the second round of the same drinks.
A little later, Tula Box came in and we had a brief chat. She told us that the “Miss Ibiza Pageant” was going on over at, well, Ibiza’s tonight and that it was going to start at 11:00. This was good for two reasons: 1) These queer bar events never start before midnight, and 2) It was 10 ’til 11.
Over at Ibiza’s after paying $9.00 to get in (again, way more money than the value), seven contestants competed for “Miss Ibiza 2007,” and though I never saw one of them, I heard a couple of their answers from out on the patio.
“If I were to be Miss Ibiza 2007, what I would bring to the title is…”
The only good thing about Ibiza’s was that our drinks went from $5.75 at Costello’s to $4.50 here. Now that’s value.